One of my fondest memories from the New School for Social Research Liberal Studies MA program comes from a course titled “Representations of Race and Gender in American Culture.” It was the day, about halfway through the semester, when co-teachers Elizabeth Kendall (author of feminist studies of <a ...
From July through October, the Nueberger Museum of Art featured these pieces, conceived by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles and executed by six groups of curators and embroiderers. Entitled “We Have a Common Thread,” these fabrics present a complex statement about violence in the Americas. Latin America is ...
When entering the bookstore of the 56th Venice Biennale of Art, you may think that having Marx’s Capital, Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, and the official catalog of the Milan Expo 2015 displayed next to each other is just a fortuitous -- and not particularly happy -- coincidence. Expo 2015 ...
Barańczak is no longer with us. In a while no one will give credence any more to the existence of this Atlantis, this man who transcended boundaries imposed by human force and a system of power. Just like the sunken platonic continent on which there existed or did not exist a ...
On a brilliantly sunny, fall afternoon, a dozen members of Witness Against Torture -- a grassroots group long dedicated to closing the prison camp at Guantánamo -- broke from our marathon strategy meeting to see the GTMO-themed installation of the renowned performance artist Laurie Anderson. Titled “Habeas Corpus,” ...
Two years ago, I thought opera was dead and, being a great lover of it, I invited you to celebrate with me a nostalgic funeral eulogy for the beautiful daughter of the Italian Renaissance. Saturday night, for the first time since I wrote that piece, I had the impression ...
“Rap music is the CNN of the ghetto.” – Chuck D
Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ...
An excerpt from ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy
The question ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ can understandably prompt one to start listing distinctive features of various plays by Shakespeare — as if a successful enumeration of its characteristics would amount to an understanding of the ...
You may not be aware that the beaver, this unlucky, little, cute rodent, has suffered a long history of oppression and exploitation. On the American continent, the beaver, a traditional source of clothing and food for native people, became soon after the arrival of the European colonizers a main object ...
When Huizi the rationalist visited Zhuangzi to express his condolences for the recent passing of Zhuangzi’s wife, he was shocked to find the great Daoist sage sprawled on the ground happily beating out a rhythm on a tub and singing with gusto. Stop this scandal! Huizi demanded, outraged at his ...
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